Hello everyone, both here today and on into the future!
My name is Ivars and the picture is one of me in a frame from my unreleased series "Tidings" that will get posted on D.Tube when all of the episodes are complete. (My profile picture is cropped from a later frame.)
I am so pleased to see what is happening here with Steemit and everything growing around it.
I worked very hard to instill decentralization into the core of the Internet in its early days and watched with horror as my plans as well as those of many others were thwarted and twisted. At the time (the mid 1990's, dial-up if you could find it, and no broadband unless you could afford $10,000 in equipment and at least $1,000 per month for a megabit connection) neither the physical infrastructure nor sufficient popular will existed to make that happen then but today that is no longer the case. The Internet now links the people of the world, albeit incompletely, but is now implemented to minutely monitor, control, and influence all of its users by entrenched powerful interests, both corporate and political.
The Internet will never be free while it has choke points that can be controlled by entrenched interests. There is no technical requirement that the Internet have service providers at all. Think about that. It's interesting that the original military requirement for the design of the Internet was for it to be decentralized and not have those choke points for obvious security reasons. All of the routers and cell phones so ubiquitous today can already talk with with each other and route data to more distant neighbors without the need for any service provider at all if only they had the software to do so. It's telling that they don't.
I'm sure to post more on this later. Suffice it to say that the hardware infrastructure is in place for a global decentralized Internet owned by no one and everyone but the software is not. This new free open global Internet could become a reality in days simply by people installing a free open source app and/or replacing the firmware on their router. That's all it would take to get it going (and years to bring it to fruition). But to make it worthwhile we need application families like Steemit along with software systems like IPFS to flesh it out. It's great to see it happening and I'll contribute what knowledge and experience I have to make it so.
Meanwhile I'm out here in the beautiful Texas Hill Country making videos and photos, creating music, writing my thoughts and ideas, and creating ways for people to make life better. (Technically retired now but still busy, I've had many eclectic careers - musician, paperboy, photojournalist, electronic engineer, salesman, rock band producer, software system architect, inventor, CEO, filmmaker... - you can find links to some of what I've done in my profile, even a video about it if you follow the links.) I'm looking forward to posting much more directly here.
Me in my CEO chair a few years ago.
If you can answer the question "If life were perfect what would it look like?" and are willing to commit to making it so, instead of a life filled with undesired reactions moving in directions you don't want you now have details to handle (an overwhelming lot, for sure, and you may not know how to handle them yet, but they are your details moving you forward and we all can learn and help and share how). It's worth remembering that the root word of "authority" is "author." Be the author of your life and share the story of your journey in this forum so we all can learn, empathize, and build on your shoulders! I will do the same and look forward to learning something and sharing the moments, feelings, insights, breakthroughs, and thoughts.
I hope to make a positive difference for everyone I touch.
Ivars
